reverence for antiquity; and he is equally willing to have recourse to
fictions, if they have a moral tendency. His thoughts recur to a golden
age in which the sanctity of oaths was respected and in which men living
nearer the Gods were more disposed to believe in them; but we must
legislate for the world as it is, now that the old beliefs have passed
away. Though he is no longer fired with dialectical enthusiasm, he would
compel the guardians to 'look at one idea gathered from many things,' and
to 'perceive the principle which is the same in all the four virtues.' He
still recognizes the enormous influence of music, in which every youth is
to be trained for three years; and he seems to attribute the existing
degeneracy of the Athenian state and the laxity of morals partly to
musical innovation, manifested in the unnatural divorce of the instrument
and the voice, of the rhythm from the words, and partly to the influence
of the mob who ruled at the theatres. He assimilates the education of the
two sexes, as far as possible, both in music and gymnastic, and, as in the
Republic, he would give to gymnastic a purely military character. In
marriage, his object is still to produce the finest children for the
state. As in the Statesman, he would unite in wedlock dissimilar natures--
the passionate with the dull, the courageous with the gentle. And the
virtuous tyrant of the Statesman, who has no place in the Republic, again
appears. In this, as in all his writings, he has the strongest sense of
the degeneracy and incapacity of the rulers of his own time.

In the Laws, the philosophers, if not banished, like the poets, are at
least ignored; and religion takes the place of philosophy in the
regulation of human life. It must however be remembered that the religion
of Plato is co-extensive with morality, and is that purified religion and
mythology of which he speaks in the second book of the Republic. There is
no real discrepancy in the two works. In a practical treatise, he speaks
of religion rather than of philosophy; just as he appears to identify